BPP and preprocessing

[Torsinadoc]

Im not sure if my protocol for DSLR preprocessing is correct. I have been using it for months and seem to have produced images to process.  I have set the correct settings in format explorer for DSLR Raw images

I then open BPP and click calibrate
I then add dark, bias, flat and lights: clicking debayer (these are all RAW files including calibration files) and hit run.
Then register light images
Imageintegration and save as fit file

Should I convert my calibration files to fit files prior to BPP?

Most of the tutorials dont include use of the BPP script or the links are no longer active.

Thanks

[bitli]

There is no need to convert to fits before using BPP (FITS can be accessed faster, but as they are normally accessed once only in BPP, there is no real gain).  This may be different if you want to try various operations on your raw (outside of BPP).

There are a couple of things to be aware of:
- You can in general prepare the master darks and bias once and re-use them (mark them as master in BPP). This saves quite some time (and you could tune them using the manual process).
- Check that your files are correct. Sometime a misloaded empty raw file may be in your input files. In that case BPP silently stop loading files from than one and keep going.  You may not realize that you had a problem and have less than optimal use of your images.
- With some DLSR you may get useless darks if you calibrate them (or even without calibrating them for a Nikon). Check that they are not mostly zero.
- BPP tends to subtract the dark from the flats too. It should not do that (why bother calibrating them if you subtract some other unrelated data). Some people create 'flat-dark' to avoid that problem.
- Optimization may or may not work.  It should give a factor reasonably close to 1 if your darks have the same exposure than the lights.  Check the log.  If you have factors like '0.03' your darks are pretty useless (and they would probably be useless even without optimization, you just don't get the error message).
- You can use CosmeticCorrection to suppress the hot pixels (very useful if you have any problem with the darks). It works well with CFA image if you tick the appropriate check box (you must prepare an icon and provide it to BPP).
- the image integration must normally be fine tuned, as you want to get the best S/R ratio while rejecting unwanted traces and cosmics.  This usually requires blinking the calibrated lights to find where the problems are and then adapting the rejection parameters to correct the problems, but no more.

Also take the time to look at the log.  Some important information may be hidden there.
You can save the log to a file by using the command 'log -f=c:/whereyouwant.log' in the console.

All this being said, I found that for DSLR a simple manual process (with prepared icons) is often faster and as good, but this has been discussed at length in other posts. If somethings works for you, fine.

-- bitli